CREATIVITY

Creativity as an Important Aspect of Business and Organisations

Creativity

Introduction

Creativity means the development, creation, and functioning of a new process, service, or product with the objective of progressing effectiveness, competitive advantage, or efficiency. Innovation can affect services, products, managerial processes, manufacturing processes, or the organisational design. It is correlated with creativity, and engages making new thoughts and setting them into actuality through research, new product development, and invention. Leaders have tremendous control over the first part of the creativity process: encouraging new ideas (or not discouraging new ideas). The second part of creativity—high-grading and stick-handling a new idea into action—is the most challenging of all. This paper discusses the major issues facing the manager in encouraging creativity in the organisation and supporting creative people in order to improve performance.

Discussion

The practical promotion and modification of an innovative invention into a working method (process innovation) or product (product innovation). Innovation is an significant way for a company to develop its competitive place over competitors by improving its product uniqueness, and for advancing market performance (by, for example, lowering supply costs and enhancing product quality). Certain kinds of market structure may be more conducive to innovation insofar as they offer better incentives and resources for undertaking research and development (see monopoly for further discussion). Innovation can be a lengthy and expensive process. For example, the original invention of the Xerox photocopying process was made in 1948, but it took a further 10 years of development work before the first commercial version of the product was put on the market. (Woodward 2000, 94 )

Innovation is also a process of developing and commercializing something new, usually a product, service or manufacturing process. The management of innovation is a growing and significant subject in its own right. While there is continued debate about the range of activities covered by the term, there is broad agreement that successful innovation management involves research, technology development, marketing and manufacturing. It is the successful co-ordination of these activities that gives competitive opportunities (or competitive problems) to firms and managers. Many writers distinguish 'product innovation' from 'process innovation'. Process innovation refers to the development of new production processes or the improvement of existing ones. Product innovation refers to the development of new products and improvements to existing ones (inevitably, there is considerable overlap here with the field of new product development) (Schön 2006, 83). The creation of a completely new product can lead to the creation of a new business, as was the case for Dyson appliances with their development of the first bagless vacuum cleaner. Some firms such as 3M have developed a reputation for being able to continually develop innovative products. It should be apparent that these innovations may represent major discontinuities, or quite minor incremental technological advances. (Agrell 2006, 12-15)

Most writers distinguish innovation from invention by suggesting invention is the conception of the idea, whereas successful innovation entails both idea conception and its subsequent translation into something of commercial and practical ...